PCAutoWaker Wakes Up Your PC When You Arrive Home

Android: PCAutoWaker is an app that instantly wakes your computer as soon as (or even before) you walk in the door, once it connects to your Wi-Fi network. The app’s Wake-on-LAN feature can actually wake up to five PCs on your network.

Save a couple of seconds getting your computer(s) to boot up by automatically waking your PC(s) as soon as you enter your home network’s Wi-Fi radius. For some, that means as soon as you pull into the driveway.

We’ve previously covered how to set up Wake-on-LAN and mentioned a couple of smartphone apps in that guide, but PcAutoWaker is helpful because it works over Wi-Fi – and automatically.

You’ll need both the SSID (name of your wireless access point) and the MAC addresses of each computer that you want to be able to wake. You can find the MAC address in your router’s status pages (or, on a Mac, in System Preferences > Network > [your particular adaptor] ; on Windows, by going to Start > Run > then typing cmd and in the Command Prompt window, ipconfig/all. Look for the 12-character physical address).

After setting up your PC(s), you can try putting your computer to sleep and then waking it with the app manually from the default configuration.

If that’s unsuccessful, you’ll need to boot into your computer’s BIOS settings to enable Internal Network Adapter boot, and also go to your network adaptor settings in Device Manager to allow the network cart to wake the computer (the setting is under the Power Management tab).

That option may be greyed out, in which case your computer’s wireless adaptor doesn’t support wake-on-wireless LAN (WoWLAN). The netbook I was using to test this had this problem. Addictive Tips says they were able to get the app to work when they connected the system to their router with an Ethernet cable; then they were able to switch on the PC (newly wired to the router) with their Android device over the Wi-Fi network.

If waking your PC with your Android device is of interest to you, give the app a try and let us know how it works for you.

PcAutoWaker on Android Market [via Addictive Tips]